Francois-Marie Arouet Voltaire

Biography

Voltaire (1694-1778) was born in Paris into a middle-class family. His father was a minor treasury official. Voltaire was educated by the Jesuits at the CollAÂ¨ge Louis-le-Grand (1704-11). From 1711 to 1713 he studied law, and then worked as a secretary to the French ambassador in Holland before devoting himself entirely to writing. Voltaire's essays did not gain the approval of authorities, but he energetically attacked the government and the Catholic church, which caused him numerous imprisonments and exiles. More ...

Animals have these advantages over man: they never hear the clock strike, they die without any idea of death, they have no theologians to instruct them, their last moments are not disturbed by unwelcome and unpleasant ceremonies, their funerals cost them nothing, and no one starts lawsuits over their wills.

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Biography of Francois-Marie Arouet Voltaire

Voltaire (1694-1778) was born in Paris into a middle-class family. His father was a minor treasury official. Voltaire was educated
by the Jesuits at the Collège Louis-le-Grand (1704-11). From 1711 to 1713 he studied law, and then worked as a secretary to the French ambassador
in Holland before devoting himself entirely to writing. Voltaire's essays did not gain the approval of authorities, but he energetically attacked the government and the Catholic church, which caused him numerous imprisonments and exiles. In his early twenties he spent eleven months in the Bastille for writing satiric verses about the aristocracy.

Voltaire did not support the dogmatic theology of institutional religions, his religiosity was anticlerical. The doctrines about the Trinity or the Incarnation he dismissed as nonsense. As a humanist, he advocated religious and social tolerance. When he wrote in his play of Muhammad as a blind and destructive barbarian, everyone knew that he meant the Roman Church. Atheism Voltaire considered not as baleful as fanaticism, but nearly always fatal to virtue.

In 1716 Voltaire was arrested and exiled from Paris for five months.
From 1717 to 1718 he was imprisoned in the Bastille for lampoons of the Regency. During this time he wrote the tragedy DIPE, and started to use the name Voltaire. The play brought him fame but also more enemies at court. With lucky speculation in the Compagnie des Indes he gained wealth in 1726.

At his 1726 stay at the Bastille Voltaire was visited by a flow of
admirers. Between 1726 and 1729 he lived in exile mainly in England. There he avoided trouble for three years and wrote in English his first essays, ESSAY UPON EPIC POETRY and ESSAY UPON THE CIVIL WARS IN FRANCE, which were published in 1727. After his return to France Voltaire wrote plays, poetry, historical and scientific treatises and became royal historiographer. HISTOIRE DE CHARLES XII (1731) used novelistic technique and rejected the idea that divine intervention guides history. In 1734 appeared his Philosophical Letters in which he compared the French system of government with the system he had seen in England. Voltaire stated that he had perceived fewer barriers between occupations in England than in his own country. The book was banned, and Voltaire was forced to flee Paris, but the English edition became a British bestseller.

At the age of thirty-nine, Voltraire started his famous sixteen-year liaison with Mme du Châtelet. She was twenty-seven, married, and the mother of three children. "I found, in 1733, a young woman who thought as I did," Voltaire wrote in his memoirs, "and who decided to spend several years in the country, cultivating her mind." The Marquis du Châtelet was well aware of the affair. With madame du Châtelet Voltare lived at the Château de Cirey in 1734-36 and 1737-40. Between the years he took a refuge in Holland (1736-37). In 1740 he was an ambassador-spy in Prussia, then in Brussels (1742-43), and in 1748 he was at the court of
King Stanislas in Lunéville. From 1745 to 1750 he was a historiographer to Louis XV and in 1746 he was elected to the French Academy. In 1750 Voltaire moved to Berlin, where he was invited by Fredrick the Great, a more enlightened ruler in theory than in practice.

Voltaire settled in 1755 in 1755 in Switzerland, where he lived the rest of his life, apart from trips to France. He had his own château, Les Delices, outside Geneva, and later at nearby Ferney, in France. Anybody of note, from Boswell to Casanova, wanted to visit the place; Voltaire's conversations with visitors were recorded and published and he was flattered by kings and nobility. Voltaire's official publishers were Gabriel and Philibert Cramer from Geneve. They operated from Stockholm to Naples, and from Venice to Lisbon and Paris, spreading the ideas of Enlightenment. In his late years Voltaire produced several anti-religious writing. In Ferney he built a chapel with the inscription 'Deo Erexit Voltaire' inscibed on the lintel. He also led campaign to open up a trial, in which the Huguenot merchant Jean Calas was found guilty of murdering his eldest
son and executed. The parliament at Paris declared afterwards in 1765
Calas and all his family innocent. - (see also the writer Emile Zola, who defended falsely accused Alfred Dreyfus in his open letter J'accuse in 1898.)

Voltaire died in Paris on May 30, 1778, as the undisputed leader of the Age of Enlightenment. He had suffered throughout his life from poor health, but at the time of his death he was eighty-four. Voltaire left behind him over fourteen thousand known letters and over two thousand books and pamphlets. Among his best-known works is
the satirical short story CANDIDE (1759), which reflected the
nihilism of Jonathan Swift. In the
story the young and innocent hero,
Candide, experiences a long series of misfortunes and disastrous
adventures. He is kicked out of the castle of Thunder-Ten-Tronckh for making love to the baron's daughter, Cunégonde, in the army he is beaten nearly to death, in Lisbon he experiences the famous earthquake, he is hunted by the Inquisition and Jesuits, and threatened with imprisonment in Paris. Meanwhile Cunégonde's father, mother and brother are hacked to pieces by invaders, and she is raped repeatedly. Eventually Candide marries Cunégonde, who has become an ugly gummy-eyed, flat-chested washerwoman, with wrinkled cheeks."If this is the best of possible worlds," Voltaire wrote, "what then are the others." Finally Candide finds the pleasures of cultivating
one's garden - "Il faut cultiver notre jardin."

Candide's world is full of liars, traitors, ingrates, thieves, misers, killers, fanatics, hypocrites, fools and so on. But Voltaire's outrage is not based on social criticism but on his ironic view of human nature. When Candide asks his friend Martin, does he believe that men have always massacred one another, Martin points out that hawks eat pigeons. "-Well, said Martin, if hawks have always had the same character, why do you supposed that men have changed?" Candide rejects the philosophy of his tutor, the unsuccessfully hanged Doctor Pangloss, who claims that "all is for the best in this best of all possible
worlds" (see Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz).
Candide was partly inspired by the devastating Lisbon earthquake
of 1755, Dr. Pangloss was allegedly a caricature of Leibniz, but it is
possible that the real model was Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis (1698-1759),
a French philosopher and scientist, and prolific writer of studies
from the physics of Venus to the proof of the existence of God.
Voltaire's L'HISTOIRE DU DOCTOEUR AKAKIA ET DU NATIF
DE SAINT-MALO (1753) openly ridiculed Maupertuis' ideas.
Candide's narrative frame, the education of a young man, was again
utilized in Stendhal's The Red and the
Black and Thomas Mann's The Magic
Mountain, among many later examples. Leonard Bernstein
made Candide a musical comedy in 1857.

In addition to Candide, Voltaire treated the problem of
evil
among others in his classic tale ZADIG (1747), set in the ancient
Babylon, and in 'Poem of the Lisbon' Earthquake'. "But how
conceive a God supremely good," Voltaire asked in the
poem, "Who heaps his favours on the sons he loves, / Yet scatters
evil with as large a hand?" MICROMÉGAS (1752) was an early
science-fiction story, in which two ambassadors from the outer space
visit Earth, and witness follies of human thought and behavior.
Voltaire possibly wrote the conte already in 1738-39. It
has similarities
with 'Voyage du Baron Gangan', which he sent to
Fredrick the Great.

As an essayist Voltaire defended freedom of thoughts and religious tolerance. In his DICTIONNAIRE PHILOSPHIQUE (1764) he defined the ideal religion - it would teach very little dogma but much morality. The work was condemned in Paris,
Geneva, and Amsterdam. For safety reasons Voltaire denied his authorship.
The book was burned with the young Chevalier de la Barre, who had neglected to take of his hat while passing a bridge, where a sacred statue was exposed.
"Common sense is not so common," Voltaire wrote in Dictionnaire Philosophique.
Later Voltaire introduced his Dictionary as a dialogical book: its
short, polemical articles were 'more useful' when 'the readers produce the
other half'. In Essay on the Manner and Spirit of Nations, Voltaire
presented the first modern comparative history of civilizations, including
Asia. Later he returned to the Chinese philosophy is his Dictionary, praising the teachings of Confucius: "What more beautiful rule of conduct has ever been given man since the world began? Let us admit that there has been no legislator more useful to the human race."

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